mounds near Harmony, on the Wabash river:—"They were made of a sort of grey clay, marked outside with rings, and seem to have been moulded in a cloth or basket, being marked with impressions or figures of this kind."[1]
It has been thought, too, that the early pottery of Europe retains in its ornamentation traces of having once passed through a stage in which the clay was surrounded by basketwork or netting, either as a backing to support the finished vessel, or as a mould to form it in. Dr. Klemm advanced this view twenty years ago. "The imitation (of natural vessels) in clay presupposes numerous trials. In the Friendly Islands, we find vessels which are still in an early stage; they are made of clay, slightly burnt, and enclosed in plaited work; so also the oldest German vessels seem to have been, for we observe on those which remain an ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. What was no longer wanted as a necessity was kept up as an ornament."[2]
Dr. Daniel Wilson made a similar remark, some years later, on early British urns which, he says, "may have been strengthened by being surrounded with a platting of cords or rushes. . . . It is certain that very many of the indented patterns on British pottery have been produced by the impress of twisted cords on the wet clay,—the intentional imitation, it may be, of undesigned indentations originally made by the platted net-work on ruder urns," etc.[3] Mr. G. J. French mentions experiments made by him in support of his views on the derivation of the interlaced or guilloche ornaments on early Scottish crosses, etc., from imitation of earlier structures of wicker-work. He coated baskets with clay, and found the wicker patterns came out on all the earthen vessels thus made, and he seems to think that some ancient urns still preserved were actually moulded in this way, judging from the lip being marked as if the wicker-work had been turned in over the clay coating inside.[4]
Taken all together, the evidence of so many imperfect and
